Los Alamos and the Manhatten Project

Category: Weapons of Mass Destruction

After the U.S. was pulled into WWII due to the attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government was notified by Einstein that the German government was working to create atomic weapons. This expedited the U.S. interest in coming up with the bomb. The government collected a group of scientists from around the world who gathered in Los Alamos, including people like Fermi who had been working in Chicago on splitting the atom. The project was headed by General Groves and given the code name the Manhattan Project. The Manhattan project's name came from the fact that many wearhouses and factories crucial to the program were located in the borough. The project began in September of 1942 and culminated with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6, 1945 and August 9 respectively. The first successful test of the a-bomb took place on July 16, 1945 in the mountains of New Mexico. Besides a select group of people the scientists working at Los Alamos were uninformed as to what the small part they were working on was for. Therefore, the bulk of the scientists did not know they were creating something of this scale of destruction. When the scientists tested the first bomb ("Gadget") they realized it was destructive on a scale that the world had never experienced. A group of scientists wrote a petition to the government stating that they felt this new technology should never be used. However, the government ignored this suggestion and thus a new threat was introduced into the world which has escalated ever since.

Carrie Desmond
Becky Cholst